The Path of Evangelism: Warnings and Promises | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. As I'm sure you can tell,

I am not Matthew Robinson, director of Media Grazie. I am Teddy James. I am usually behind the cameras during the

Behold Your God podcast. Right now we have AC who is standing in for me behind the cameras operating things.

But Matt could not be here today. And, but we wanted to discuss, continue our discussion from last week on evangelism with Dr.

John Snyder, author of the Behold Your God series. Last week, John, we talked about, well, basically we introduced the topic of evangelism.

We're gonna spend the next couple of weeks on. We discussed how we are guides to Christ.

We are ambassadors much like in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, evangelist, consistently pointed to Christ.

We start with who is Christ? What are his rights? And we talked about one of the, you know, one of the illustrations that you gave that I thought was particularly helpful to me is that the scripture is not just a bucket of pills, you know, that we just reach in and we throw out and just say, some of this is gonna be good for you.

But there were particular scriptures to be applied in particular ways, in particular situations.

We looked at the model of Jesus, you know, with Nicodemus, with the rich young ruler.

And so if you happen to miss that last week, just know that that is always available at mediagratia .org.

We've got a blog, it'll have links to everything. In fact, this episode will have links to previous episodes as well.

So where are we going? What is the next step on this path? Where are we going now? Well, we wanna borrow some help from a man named

Samuel Walker, who we mentioned. Walker was an 18th century minister in the

Church of England. And I mean, we're in the 21st century and I'm a Baptist pastor. So you might think that there's a lot of disconnect there, but actually

Walker is a really helpful guide and his acquaintance with the gospel, his acquaintance with the person of Christ and his acquaintance with the state of the sinner are so particularly clear in the way that he dealt with souls that I think that he has a lot to say that helps us.

So let me just give a short introduction to him. Walker was born in 1714 and strangely, a wonderful picture of God's providence.

That's the same year that George Whitefield was born. They both went to the same university system, Oxford. But as far as I know,

I don't know of any place in their journals where they mentioned knowing each other before they met each other as ministers years later.

So they're both going to Oxford to train as ministers. They're both very religious, sincere guys, and they're both lost.

But that's also the same year that the Welsh leaders of their great awakening of the evangelical revival were born,

Hal Harris and Daniel Rowland were also born in 1714. Just if you think about kind of a

Christian almanac, the year 1714, quite an extraordinary year when so many boys are born that would become some of the greatest preachers in their country ever.

Walker becomes a minister though before he really knows the

Lord. And that sadly is the case often. He becomes a minister in the town of Southern England.

It's kind of a resort area, really nice area called Truro. And there in that town, there is a headmaster, a schoolmaster, so we would call him kind of the principal of the grammar school.

And his name is George Conan. And through George's influence,

Samuel Walker realizes that while he has the form of religion and all the trappings of religion, especially as a minister, he doesn't really have the power of religion.

He doesn't know Christ. And so he cries out to the Lord and he himself is converted.

Now that begins a ministry, you know, that now with Christ at the heart of that, that is extraordinary, is one of the most extraordinary ministries in the 18th century in Great Britain.

And that is a century of many extraordinary ministries. So it's during the time of the evangelical revival, he soon links up with other men who are like -minded in the revival, like George Whitefield or John Wesley or some of the other lesser known, but equally wonderful ministers.

His theology though, is on the side of Whitefield in those areas that Whitefield and Wesley disagreed.

So for lack of a better way of saying it, he is a Calvinistic man. He's what they often called them

Calvinistic Methodists. Not Methodist in the sense of a denomination, but being very methodical.

So we would say he was like a Puritan a hundred years after the Puritans. So as a minister now, he preaches differently.

He has a different view of what a true Christian is. And this upsets the apple cart, the

Church of England that he's a minister of, he's a curate, kind of an associate pastor. The church where he's ministering, they're not very happy with the changes in their new minister.

And so they ask the Bishop to kick him out. And so the

Bishop of the area visits Truro and sits down with Samuel Walker, who's just in his 20s.

And basically he's there to let him know gently that you're gonna be removed from the church because your new approach to things isn't palatable.

But the Bishop, and Walker knows this is why the Bishop has come. And the Bishop is so taken aback by Walker's simple, attractive

Christ -likeness that he doesn't really know what to do. So he has tea with Walker at his house, he talks with him, and he's so impressed with the young man that he just leaves without doing what he came to do, what the wealthy people in the parish sent him to do, and that was to get rid of this bothersome young minister.

So he goes back to the people that pay his salary and says, well,

I visited him, but I didn't do it. And they're furious. So they say to him, well, go back and do it.

So after a period of time, the Bishop visits him again. And again, he's there for the purpose of letting him know that you will be moved to some other place because the people here just don't like you.

And again, Walker knows why he's there, and he's just very gracious. And the

Bishop is, again, just charmed by the Christ -likeness, the aroma of Christ about this man's life.

And he just can't bring himself to fire him. So he goes back again, having failed. And so he's in trouble again with those that kind of are over him and putting pressure on him.

And so he basically says to him, well, if you wanna fire him, you go fire him. I can't do it. So the short is that Walker never gets fired.

And there's this lifelong ministry. And it is so wonderfully blessed by the

Lord that Wesley and Whitfield, traveling and ministering throughout the UK, Whitfield throughout the

American colonies, really, they recognize that Samuel Walker's influence there has permeated the area so thoroughly that there's no need for them to labor there.

And they just kind of leave that region to Walker. And it's just a wonderful series.

And we'll put on the podcast a book that we have that has his life and the things we're gonna talk about.

But now, as he goes on, even though that sounds wonderful, he's part of that great period of revival.

But it doesn't start that way. There's a lot of opposition, not just from the top, but there's a lot of opposition from the sinners.

So when he does evangelism in the town, people don't want it. And it took a while to see a convert.

But when there was a convert, he was encouraged. And then that convert died.

And so he preaches their funeral. And when he preaches the funeral, immediately following the funeral, it's like God breaks the dam and the flood starts coming.

So many people begin to seek him out. And kind of, you can see the connection.

We saw this person changed by the gospel. They were a nice Church of England member, but now they're different.

You're different. And the things you're saying are different. And the things you said at the funeral, they bother us.

And so suddenly there's a flood of people now coming, wanting to know how they can be right with God.

And so there are so many that Walker has to kind of put them on the calendar and line them up and say, well, your

Tuesday, your Wednesday, your Thursday, just come two or three at a time. And I'll talk to you about your souls.

And this went on for a long time. And he had to kind of sit down and think through, how am

I gonna deal with their souls? Because there's so many coming, I need to have this, and I probably need to have this in my head pretty clear.

So he did. And he wrote it down. And other ministers later asked him, well, how did you deal with the souls?

And he sent them what has been called in that biography, a scheme of instruction or a way of instructing these souls.

How do I guide these souls? And that's what we're gonna be talking about for the next few weeks.

So these people, now this was in England, like you say. So these people were, they're already in the

Church of England. I mean, that's kind of how it works, right? So they were christened in. Well, what you would say, they were members of the church.

I think, especially in our area, most people would say, well, if you're a member of church, then you kind of just do better.

Just read more, study more. But that's not the route that he took. Yeah, so Church of England, 96 % of the population were

Church of England in England and Wales. So very few were Baptist, Congregationalist or Presbyterians at this time.

You became a member really just by being a citizen. So you're born in England, you're born in Wales.

You would be christened and immediately made a member. But the ignorance of Scripture, basic Scripture in these people that he found was shocking.

So he had to start all the way back at the beginning. He couldn't say to them, well, you understand the finished work of Christ.

You understand the doctrine of repentance. You understand what faith is. So embrace

Christ, throw yourself upon him. Well, what about Christ am

I embracing? What about me am I turning away from? So he has to start all the way at the beginning.

And that's one reason that his approach is so helpful to us because it starts at the foundation.

And that is God dealing with the sinner in the process that we call the conviction of sin.

And that's where we're gonna focus today. Yeah, yeah. So today let's talk about, we're not gonna get any further than that.

We'll talk about what is conviction? How does

God do that? How do we cooperate in that? How does that change the way we do evangelism?

If God begins with convicting people, then that changes the way. If God starts there, then

I need to start there. And we'll be talking today also about why.

Why would conviction be essential? Why can't we just move from? Okay, so you're not a

Christian. So if you just accept these lists of facts I'm about to tell you and pray this prayer

I'm about to give you, you can immediately be a Christian and that's kind of the end of the story. So why is conviction a part of that?

So let's think about that. Conviction, the scripture is very clear.

John chapter 16, Christ is telling the disciples he's about to leave them. That would be a very frightening thing for someone who's risked everything in life to follow this man.

And now the man is saying, actually I'm about to go complete what my father gave me to do here and I will no longer be here with you.

So you've left everything to follow this man and he's saying he's leaving you. Are you abandoning us? Why can't we follow you?

Well, I'm going to send you another. I'm going to send you the spirit. And in fact, the sending of the spirit as what has been promised all along is so good that it's better for you that I do this and send the spirit than if I were to stay with you physically.

But one of the things the spirit, Jesus says we'll do in John 16, he says this in verse eight.

And he, when he comes, will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

So the spirit will do something that convicts or that exposes the truth about sin and righteousness and judgment.

But for our purpose today, how does he do that? And -

Because it's not something that we can manipulate and which is something I see very often where, okay, well, let me tell you how bad you are and work up emotions and we'll call that conviction.

Well, it's not the same as conviction. Yeah, I've been to a, well, actually as a college kid,

I worked with a crusade that came through town. And so I was very excited this first time

I'd ever worked with the crusade. And I was just a counselor and like the guy that, one of the guys that did work before the speaker got to town.

So we did a lot of evangelistic efforts, a lot of announcement, a lot of inviting people. And then it came time for the crusade and we're sitting in the crusade and the preacher preached a message and he was a very vibrant, exciting speaker, a lot of personal testimonies of drugs and the ruined life and that now

I'm a Christian. And he got to the end and the evangelistic invitation was given and nobody really was doing much moving other than the people that were, we who were the counselors.

So we came down first and it looked like, well, hey, there's 30 or 40 people wanting to get saved and that was meant to encourage other people.

But nobody was coming. And so the evangelist wasn't happy with that.

So he started giving these kind of what I would consider now manipulative statements.

He'd say, now some of you, some of your girls, your boyfriends left you. And well, in a crowd that size, there'd probably be a lot of girls that got broke up with that month, and so, but if you want a friend that'll never leave you, you just come down right now.

And so there was like a handful of girls that started crying from the crowd and they start making their way to the front.

But that wasn't enough for the evangelist. And so the evangelist said, some of you, you've got friends that need a friend that'll never leave them.

You just grab them by the hand right now. You bring them with you. And so then they came, and so there's a lot of young ladies.

There was a lot of emotion. Is that what we're talking about? Is that what the spirit does? And if it is, then that's how we should approach it.

But if it's not, if we go back to the scripture and consider what God convinces us of in order to bring us to the point where we realize that there is no hope for us except for Jesus Christ, then we wanna study that and we want to cooperate with that and we can.

Now, what Walker did was he always began there, but not with just screaming and, you know, browbeating them about hell.

One of the first things Walker mentions in his scheme of instruction is interesting. He says, you simply, when in that first meeting, you sit down and you show them from the scripture, just very simple statements, the fact that every man and woman and child, we are all guilty and blameworthy, and we really do deserve the wrath of God that hangs over us.

And here are the scriptural evidences of that. But then he said this, but you need also to spend some time in that first meeting, showing them the promise of God, not just the threatenings of God, not just that that's legitimate, but the promises of God, which ought to be shocking to us, but really aren't at first, the promises of forgiveness, that God is willing and able.

And the reason that he did both at the beginning, even before he really went into the depth of man's need, was because Walker understood what we all need to understand and we can get this from scripture, that the threatenings of God do not really accomplish their purpose in us, unless they are laid aside some hope producing promises.

In fact, I remember reading where John Calvin mentioned that, that I was just reading through some portion of scripture and I don't often read

John Calvin, but I went and got a commentary from Calvin and there it was. And Calvin's commentaries are always so helpful, so balanced.

So he says, hey, God doesn't just threaten, but God offers the hope in these gospel promises and together,

I mean, if all you have is threatenings, well, who wants to go have kind of, so to speak, face -to -face dealings with the king that's mad at you?

I mean, we ended up being like Adam and Eve. Okay, I know I'm wrong. I know I did something terrible and I feel the shame of it.

And here comes a holy God. Well, so really for me, the last place I wanna be is close to him.

So I'll just go hide behind the trees. That's what you get when all you talk about is the wrath of God.

Now, we know that there's the danger of only talking about the love of God, saying God just loves you, that that's really all you need to know.

That's not what the Bible does either. But if you combine the two, wrath of God and the promise of hope through Christ, then together they do produce, under the

Holy Spirit's ministry, they produce a powerful motivator for a person taking seriously what you're about to say on the gospel.

Yeah, and I think they really do have to be, and we've all seen instances where one has been divorced from the other and one can lead to absolute despair and the other leads to easy believism, ultimately is,

I think, what it is. And so you say that it's a powerful motivator.

Why? Why is it that these two things motivate us toward Christ?

Well, you know, Paul mentions in Romans that it's the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. So why not just talk about kindness?

Well, because as blind, lost men, we don't realize how kind His kindness is, how amazing the grace is, how shocking it should be to us.

Unless we see the other side of truth, that we don't deserve that kind of friendship from the King. And so we will never really appreciate the kindness unless we start with the truth about ourselves.

But if we only have the truth about ourselves, like I said, you know, we wouldn't go to the King. So the truth about ourselves makes the kindness of God appear in its right light.

It is something of such a shocking nature. It's a jar to our system.

Why are you treating me this way when I have treated you this way? And so that, you know, together those things make the gospel effective.

Now, when Walker talks about conviction though, he has a very clear approach.

And basically where he starts is this, that man's nature itself is wrong.

So in other words, when he talked with a person, and so they come to him and say, you know, Mr. Walker, I've not lived a very good life.

In fact, I've done some pretty bad things I'm ashamed of, and I need to be right with your God. Well, Walker could easily have said, well, what have you done?

Well, that's a pretty lousy life you lived. And so you're gonna need some help with that.

But he doesn't start there. He starts with what we are, not what we did.

So it's what I am that's wrong in the eyes of God, not just what

I do. It's what I am that's producing the lifestyle. So if we could use theological terminology, it's my nature.

I have a fallen or a sinful nature. And if I don't understand that, then

I think that what I am is a pretty good guy, not perfect, pretty good guy. So I'm a pretty good guy on the inside, but I have some external problems.

My circumstances, my family, my work, the way I was brought up. We need to deal with those lies so that in a person turning to Christ, they don't just turn from some surface sins.

Like, okay, I shouldn't have yelled. I shouldn't drink. I shouldn't look at those things on the internet. You know, I shouldn't say those things to my family.

I shouldn't have that attitude toward my boss. Well, no, you shouldn't. But the problem goes much deeper.

And if you don't realize that, then there can be some problems. Yeah, so basically it goes into an understanding of depravity, which you and Matt talked about last week.

What is depravity? But we really do have to have a solid understanding of the depravity of our nature and also the holiness of God.

Yeah, so depravity, meaning that sin has influenced every aspect of life, or it has poisoned everything.

It has tainted everything. So even the holy things, even my most religious moment, is tainted by the fact that what

I am is wrong, and it's all flowing out of that. And so apart from the work of Christ, there's no use trying to fix yourself with religion because your religion has the same stain on it that your bad things have.

Think of it this way. I mean, when I think of talking to younger people, especially, I try to think of simple illustrations, but I find them most helpful for myself.

If a person doesn't understand that their very nature is wrong, then they will always gravitate toward the false hope that because I'm a pretty good person who's done some bad things, if the preacher will just tell me what to do differently,

I look within, I stir myself up, I say, come on, you can do better than that. And now the preacher's told you what to do better, so join the church, do this, do this.

Stop doing this. They always will look within for the answer instead of looking outside of themselves.

Somebody other than me is gonna have to be the answer for me. And salvation becomes keeping a list of rules.

Yeah, yeah, so you just try to clean up. So here's the illustration. Imagine a kid that comes in and they are filthy.

So mom, you kind of hear the cry of your wife, what have you been doing?

And the kids come in, TJ, you got little kids. They come in and they're just covered in filth.

And so mom stops him at the door and say, no, no, no, no, you're not even coming in like that.

Like, you know, if it's summer. Yeah, if it's summertime in Mississippi, you can just hose them down. So like, no, take those shoes off.

No, just take those, take your shirt off. Take, okay, now, and you get them to the, you know, you take them to the bathtub and you hand them a bar of soap and you say, you know, don't get out of that bathtub until you're clean.

Now, what if the soap that we hand them is some new hippie, crunchy soap that's all organic and that it's kind of half dirt?

I mean, what if someone actually made a bar soap made out of mud? And so you hand them a bar of dirt and you say, now, you get in that bathtub and you scrub with that bar of dirt until you're clean.

Well, nobody would do that. I mean, you know, some hippie soap smells like dirt, but it's not really dirt.

So, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah. So, you know, you wouldn't do that to your kids.

Nobody would be so stupid. But as Christians, we can do that.

We can say to a person, you know, you've made a real mess of your life, but I'm gonna give you three or four things that you're supposed to do.

You just go through these steps and you can make a new and better you. This is so easy. Yeah, and it's very palatable to our pride.

You know, I don't want to be a beggar. Who wants to be a beggar? I don't want to be the hopeless person that people pity.

Well, then you cannot be a Christian because the only person that goes to Christ on Christ's terms is the person who has looked at themself and said, you know,

I would have as much hope getting clean scrubbing with a bar of soap. I mean, a bar of mud as I would have of making this life any better by my willpower and things.

So what now, how does Walker do that? Well, he talks about two approaches.

In cooperating with the Holy Spirit, convicting, he starts at the right place.

It's not what you've done that's so bad, it's what you are. So how do you show a person that? Well, he said, well, there's two different, kind of two different ways.

With adults who can look back at a life that there's plenty of evidence that my choices have been pretty selfish.

What he did with adults was he would look at some of the specific things that they had done that were wrong, and he would work backward.

He would say, well, if this is what's showing up on the outside of your life, do you understand that that's evidence that what the

Bible says is true and that is the inside of your life is wrong? These are just, this is just the fruit.

What's the root look like? And so he would work backward from the shameful choices back to the ruined nature.

But he said with children, in dealing with children's souls, oftentimes, children, it's not as if they have a long list of heinous crimes that they're embarrassed of.

So with children, he said, he did deal with what the Bible says about their nature, the interiority of them.

This is what God says about the inside of you. And that is why you find yourself making selfish choices.

But because the startling selfishness of their choices isn't quite apparent yet while they're still young, he started at the heart.

Now, when we say that a person's nature is sinful, you know, we can kind of approach it in those three ways that Paul does in Romans 3.

He talks about the mind, no one understands God. He talks about the heart, no one seeks God.

Nobody really wants the God of the Bible on their own. And he talks about the will, no one obeys

God. So he deals with those three things. Now, first, the heart.

Well, let's take the mind first. First, the mind. That because of our sinfulness, because of Adam's sin and humanity has been affected, the intellect is affected.

So it's not just that we have wrong desires. We have a wrong way of thinking, and that's behind the wrong desires.

And we see this most often when people say things like, well, look, I would like to believe the gospel.

I would like to trust God. I've tried, I just can't. And so there's this kind of a thin veneer of kind of religious honorable honesty.

Like, I really wanna be a Christian, but I need to be honest with you. I can't believe this stuff, and I've tried.

Actually, that's a lie. If you think about the issue of trust and belief and things like that, do we not as humans, you could say to the person in front of you who says,

I've tried that, I just can't. Well, do you ever trust people that you don't perfectly know yet?

No, you do all the time. You know, you don't - I go and interview my pilot when I get onto a plane.

Yeah, and every time you go to the bank and there's a new teller, you don't say, look, we need to have the talk here. You know, it's gonna,

I need to - Let me get you to the back room. Right, I need to Google you, you know? And I need some verification.

I'm gonna need some character. I'm not gonna hand my money through that little window to you. Who knows what you'll do with it? We'll give you my bank account number.

Yeah, so there's a lot of things in life where we trust people that we have not, we don't have the ability to validate everything about them.

So let's not pretend that we don't trust people unless we know them perfectly and every question in our mind is answered.

We say that about God, but that's really not the issue. We also see in human nature that we are willing to trust people who have knowingly lied to us before.

I mean, we have friends that have lied to us or a family member that's lied to us or a coworker that's lied to us. I mean,

I don't, it doesn't have to be a very cruel lie. You know, they borrow money. They say, I'll pay you Friday. Friday comes, they go, man, look,

I'm sorry, man. Something happened last night. I had to use the money for something else.

I'll pay you next week. And then something else happens. And you begin to realize they're not a really trustworthy person.

But there are times still when they'll say something to you and you believe them. But think about sin. Every time sin has tempted us by making us promises of happiness, because who's tempted by things that promise you unhappiness?

You know, it's like being tempted with broccoli. Nobody gets tempted by broccoli and Brussels sprouts. We're tempted with desserts, you know, with snicker bars and potato chips.

So sin comes up and it wears a mask. Every time it says, actually, TJ, this time, this time, this time, first time ever,

I will make you happy if you do what I say. And we, sometimes we believe that lie. And, you know, we want to shake ourselves after we believe the lie and we find ourselves once again deceived.

And we're miserable and we're grieved that we do that. And we wanna say, look in the mirror and say to ourselves, why did you believe sin again?

It lied to you every time. In fact, it has never once told you the truth. Why are you willing to risk your life and to trust everything to the next temptation?

So when someone says, well, I'm not sure I can trust God, so I can't be a Christian. I'm not sure

I can trust this gospel. I have a few questions that are still unanswered, so I can't be a Christian. So what we come down to is this, the problem with the mind is it's clouded with sin.

We don't want to trust God because of the cost. You know, we can't trust because we don't want to trust.

Right, I won't, that's why I can't. But my won't is so thorough, is so ingrained with every fiber of who

I am. I won't trust somebody else over me, over my feelings, over my desires, that apart from a mighty work of the

Lord, the mind will always remain a slave to sin. That's just the mind.

And so Walker would start there. Think about the way you think. Do you see how your thinking is wrong?

It's not just what you're doing. Then he talked about the heart, the desires. We love the very things that are most destructive to us.

We secretly desire the things that are most foul at times, the ugliest forms of selfishness.

And we refuse to want the things that are most attractive. You know, when we look at our heart and we look at what

God says about himself, the maddening question is, why don't you want him? I mean, so here's a king that you've offended, but the king comes to you with words of friendship.

Why aren't you enticed? If you offend your boss and your boss comes to you and says, you know that what happens next is you're fired, or you know that I'm gonna have to report this to the police, what you just did.

And you know this, but I offer you friendship instead. You would be grateful.

But God offers us friendship and we say, well, I don't know. It's not the kind of friendship that I necessarily would want.

I could take it or leave it. Yeah. So why do we not like the things that are so attractive?

Why do we have an appetite for things that are so destructive? And Walker shows people evidence of this and says, it's because the heart, the desires, the deepest desires, something's wrong with them.

It's what you are that's wrong. Now, then there's the will. Our will, our volition, the faculty with which we make our choices.

Something's twisted and bent there as well. It's not just my thinking is wrong and my desiring is wrong, but my choosing is wrong.

I am averse, opposed to. Paul goes so far as to say, there's an animosity here.

I am opposed to the authority of God. I don't find it within me to be able to submit to another king when

I'm already king, you know? And he would point out to the folks, you know that you have willfully chosen things that offend your creator.

Your conscience has been pricked. You have a Bible if you care to read it, but you've continued to live that way your whole life.

Your will, something at the heart of your will is wrong. And so he would take those things using the choices of the adult and say, do you see evidence of that?

Yes. Well, what we have then is a heart issue. There's a general disregard for God.

And that shows that the heart is wrong. It's what you are that's the problem, not just what you're doing.

Yeah, and because what could be more lovely than God?

What is more beautiful than Christ? And yet we do, especially when we're lost, there is no attraction there.

There is, we don't see the loveliness of Christ. But not only that, the entire discussion that Walker is having with these people, it's so different than what we typically hear today, because salvation today is almost this idea of, okay, now

I need to stop doing the things that I love and start doing the things that I hate. Whereas Walker, and I'm kind of echoing Paul Washer here, but Walker is saying, no, no, you hate what is good because of what is inside you, because of what you are, and you love what is evil.

And it takes the supernatural act of God. That's why we have to have a new heart.

But we have to understand both of those things. And this is what we're talking about, going back even to the very beginning.

We're talking about, you can't just focus on what you are. You also have to focus on the fact, yes, this is who you are, but there's

God who is able and willing to save the lost. Yeah, yeah, and as he carries on with his scheme, and he turns to Christ, he's gonna deal with that.

But if you don't start with conviction, if you don't show people, it's not just that you've made some bad choices or you've gotten angry or you've given into greed or you've become bitter or lustful, that's what you are.

And if they don't see that, then we end up with, which we'll talk about in a minute, we end up with a kind of a faith that really isn't linked with repentance.

It's just wanting to add Jesus to what I already have. And one other thing, so this is all that happened in the first meeting, right?

Just these two major truths is what we're talking about. And then he would say, okay, now go, think through these things, wrestle with these things, and then we'll meet again later.

Yeah, yeah, and he's in a pastoral situation where he could do that. And that is a wonderful, a very freeing reality that I don't have to say before they leave the house, if you'll just, wait, wait, before you go, if you'll just pray this prayer, because you might step out my front door and get run over by a truck.

So it's not that we hold the gospel away. It's not that we say, look, there's a six -week process.

There's six talks I wanna have with you, and I'm not gonna tell you about the hope of Christ until the sixth week.

I would definitely not encourage people to do that. So remember we said at the beginning, he mentions the sinfulness, there's sin, but there's also the hope in Christ.

But he started with them, if they were ignorant of their spiritual condition, he started with them with this issue of conviction.

Why is it you even need a Savior? So that there would be a motivation there to take seriously what he says later about Christ.

And obviously, this is not a scheme where you have to go through six stages, and then at the end,

I think Walker, if he sees a person has laid hold of the fact of their sinfulness, like the

Philippian jailer, what must I do to be saved? Well, then the work of conviction has done its job.

It's brought you to the place where you're no longer looking to yourself for anything. The heart's already plowed up. Yeah, so the heart's plowed, and then you apply the gospel.

You know, remember why conviction is the first step.

Men and women who feel that there's any hope within themselves will not go to someone else for help.

God will not fill an already full life. Yes, so the emptying precedes the filling, the stripping precedes the clothing.

And so, you know, so that's why he begins there. Now, another thing

I think we could say about this is that in dealing with what we are, showing the mind, the heart, the will are polluted, really, we're calling upon people in repentance to turn from this false idea that they've crafted of themselves all their life.

I mean, we start from day one, kind of getting an idea like, well, I'm this kind of person, you know? If you scold your five -year -old for doing something wrong, you may get a reply like,

I'm not bad, I'm good. Like, no, I'm good. So, you know, early on, we're trying to kind of deal with this clash in our mind.

I'm supposed to be a good person, but I seem to keep doing wrong things. So what is it?

Am I a bad person? No, no, no, no, I'm pretty good. We can't accept the fact we're a bad person. Right, so really, when we give time for the

Holy Spirit to show the person the truth about themselves, then ultimately, repentance goes all the way to the root of your identity.

God, I am this. I turn from what I am to what you are.

I turn from who I am to who you are. But if there isn't the gospel, you know, mixed in with this, then who could bear to be honest about their identity?

I mean, who could really bear to? The truth is terrible. And I don't know anybody that could survive the psychological crash that you run into of being honest about who you really are if Christ wasn't right there meeting us at a mercy seat or at the cross, so to speak.

I mean, I remember when I was in college, studying for the ministry, but unconverted, and I would do things that I'm ashamed of.

I would come to God, and I would kind of, I would never say this out loud in a prayer because I'd been in church long enough to know not to talk this way.

But this is what I thought. I'm better than this. I'm sorry, God, I'm kind of shocked.

I'm better than this. So if you just give me another chance tomorrow, tomorrow's gonna be different.

I'll do better. So for John Snyder to go to God and say, I'm not better than this,

I'm really worse than this, this behavior, you know, this is what

I am. And it's what I am that is so offensive to God every moment of every day.

And I could never bear to come to grips with that reality until I saw the cross, you know?

So as we're dealing with souls, and we're pointing them to the interior problem, if the

Holy Spirit takes that and opens their eyes, we need to expect that it's gonna be, it'd be pretty traumatic for the person.

It won't be a calm experience, you know, where they say, well, I did the homework you gave me this week, and yeah, I can see that, you know,

I agree. What's the next step? Then you realize you probably haven't seen it.

Because when you see it, it's traumatic. And you go to the, and the person comes back to you, you know, the

Christian, and they say to you as the Christian, I can't believe that what you've been saying is true.

Is there any hope for me? I remember, it's happened on more than one occasion as a pastor, but I remember one evening, a lady calling for my wife about 11 o 'clock, you know?

Well, 11 o 'clock is past the polite time to call people with little kids. And they had little kids, we had little kids.

And I thought, whoa, what's the emergency? Somebody's in the hospital or something. But the woman called to talk to my wife about her soul, and she said, you know,

I've always been a pretty religious person, pretty good person, but I see now that everything

I do has wrong mixed in it. I am, basically,

I am ruined. I don't know what to do. Where do I go now? And so my wife was able to talk to her about the gospel, about Christ, and apply it to her.

So that's why we're starting there. Sick people don't, healthy people, or people that don't know they're sick, don't go to a doctor.

It's not until you feel the pain that you go to the doctor. And the unconverted person, the self -righteous person that feels that they can still fix it, they don't go to Christ.

Now, one other thing before we close down our section today, and that is that he also would, as part of the conviction, he would also talk to them about the beauty of God, the perfections of God.

Because it's really, you know, we see ourselves, and we tend to do this dodge.

Well, okay, I'm not perfect. But like Joe that I work with, he's a scumbag, you know? Joe is a scoundrel.

Joe cheats on his wife. Joe makes jokes about it. Joe does this. Joe steals from the company. I don't do those things.

So he, after talking with them about themselves, he would point them to God. And one thing this does is, and this may not be in the first conversation you have.

I mean, like if you're witnessing to a fellow, a coworker, and you sit beside him at lunch break or a coffee break, this may be over a number of days or a number of opportunities, however many

God gives you. So, but he would also move from that to talking about God.

If you can show them the perfection of the king that they've lived against, the goodness, the cleanness,

God can use that to help them see their sin for the first time in its true light.

It's not just dangerous, it's filthy. It's despicable.

It's not just that I've done some bad things that are gonna get me in trouble, but I have lived against this person, the only person that no one should ever live against.

He's perfect, you know? And it's like, I think of it like this.

If we present these things correctly and the Holy Spirit uses them, it's like a man being in a dark room, okay?

Imagine that that's the picture of the human soul. And the room is completely dark, completely dark.

And on the wall is this giant mirror. It's his conscience.

And every day the man wakes up and he's never lived anywhere but in this completely dark room.

He wakes up and let's say the man's wearing a suit, but the suit kind of maybe representing his lifestyle, his choices, the suit's filthy, it's ratty, it's torn, its buttons are off, it's covered in the mess of his life.

He is the nastiest man you've ever met. And he walks over each morning, he gets up and he kind of stumbles over and he feels the mirror on the wall and he knows it's a mirror and he looks at himself and he says, well, you know,

I'm not perfect, but could be worse. But he's never seen himself.

His conscience is clouded. He doesn't understand how foul his life has become.

Now imagine in that room, we could in our illustration, imagine we could put a sun, an

S -U -N, a star. We could put the sun of our solar system right in the middle of that room.

And suddenly when that man's looking at the mirror of himself in his conscience, for the first time in his life ever, the realities of God are shining in there and he sees himself as God sees him and he's horrified.

And it destroys him. I didn't know I looked like this.

Why didn't somebody tell me I was this way? I always thought I was better than this. This is horrible. There's no way

I could fix this. So that's conviction. But when we show them

God and the cross is part of that, we begin to point them to the cross.

There's something about that light behind them that terrifies them because it just exposed them.

But there's something about that clean, perfect light. When God begins to work in our heart that we say to ourselves,

I don't think I have the courage to turn and face whoever's at the center of that light, but I wish

I could. I don't want to get close to that light because I'm so nasty and embarrassed, but I wish

I could be close to that light. There's something about the light that is so attractive. But how could a person like me turn around and walk into the light and not be forever humiliated?

And of course, the answer is the work of Christ. But in conviction, we know that God is at work.

When people quit saying things like, well, we're all sinners. And they start saying things like,

I never knew that this was the truth about me, but it is true. And I deserve hell, but there's something about this

God that you're telling me about that I wish I could know Him. I wish there was a way for me to have peace with Him.

I would love to know that God. So I think that's when we know they're coming to the end of that plowing and they're ready for the gospel seat.

And so we can pick that up in our further podcast. Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that to me is so freeing, one, we're not trying to take all of these things and cram them into one episode.

It frankly would not be a good thing to do. Each of these deserve their own episode. But there's something outside of that that really needs to be said as well.

And it's that we, especially in the culture I grew up in, it was very much of, okay, you have the opportunity.

You have to have a decision right now. Take time, the responsibility, the work of conviction is the work of God.

Now, God uses us as instruments, certainly. But ultimately, it is the work of the

Spirit of God. And we are cooperating with Him. We are tools in His hand.

And that's really what we want to be. And, but we want to be, well -prepared tools, if I could say it that way.

And so, that's why we are taking several episodes to talk about these things. But also, we should be encouraged because when we do have those opportunities to present the gospel, when we do have opportunities to sit down with people and discuss their sin, discuss the loveliness of Christ, take your time.

And we're gonna talk a lot more about that in our Supporter Appreciation episode that we're going to record here in just a few minutes.

So, but we do want to say thank you for taking some time out and listening to these things.

We hope that they are beneficial and encouraging to you. You can, the book that we're talking about,

Samuel Walker of Truro, where all this is kind of coming from. Yeah, that's the easiest read on his life.

Yeah, so we'll have a link to that down in the show notes at mediagracie .org, or if that's hard to spell, you can go to themeansofgrace .org.

We want to let you know that the Supporter Appreciation episode that we just mentioned is available to anyone who is a monthly partner of Mediagracie.

But we never want finances to be a barrier between people who want our content and the content that we create.

So, if that's you, you can reach out to us at info at mediagracie .org. Tell us your story.

We'd love to get that content to you. But that email is also for if you have questions, if you have feedback, we'd love to hear from you and to get your thoughts.